Desktop Outsourcing
Giga, 12/4/03: Key Metrics for Desktop Outsourcing
Robert McNeill
What core metrics related to costs should be tracked by organization reviewing or renewing existing desktop outsourcing contracts?
Although we caution companies to be wary of averages, through our interaction with customers we are currently seeing bundled outsourcing prices for desktop services averaging from $120 per month to $150 per month for a PC, including the cost of hardware with a three year to four year refresh cycle, a standard operating system image (operating system and core Microsoft applications, for example), IT asset management (ITAM), break/fix, disposal/shipping costs, help desk, and install, move, add, change (IMAC) services. The estimate for laptops is roughly 20 percent to 25 percent higher.
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Outsourcing
Forrestor, 12/8/03: New Research From Forrester States 60 Percent Of Fortune 1,000 Companies Are Not Outsourcing Offshore
Cambridge, Mass., December 8, 2003 . . . Sixty percent of the Fortune 1,000 firms in the US have not jumped on the offshore outsourcing bandwagon, and another 25 percent are in the experimentation phase, according to new research from Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR). Despite the hype surrounding the mass exodus of IT jobs to cheaper workers overseas, only five percent of the Fortune 1,000 has taken full advantage of offshore outsourcing.
Forrester finds that the move to offshore is not a simple short-term project for firms but a four-stage journey taking place over a 24- to 60-month period. Fortune 1,000 firms have varying levels of insight and experience with offshore suppliers, internal project management skills, and perceptions of the offshore work force. Based on these differences, Forrester classifies firms into the following four stages:
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IT Services
Gartner, 12/3/03: Repositioning for an IT Services Business Recovery
Abstract: The budding recovery in IT services spending requires concerted management action encompassing sales, marketing, alliances and channels, human capital and service delivery.
By Lewis Clark, Christine Adams, Barbara Gomolski, Mike Haines, Martin Lee and Laura McLellan
Recommendations
- Maintain cost discipline in operations to sustain the cash flow necessary for new service investments and market opportunities.
- Understand how margin levers will change in an environment of increasing spending but sustained competitive price pressure.
- HR service development, and marketing campaigns and sales efforts should be based on packaged solutions to best embed and exploit industry knowledge and process expertise.
- Increase the effective leverage of other IT providers through alliance and channel partnerships for accelerated entry into new services markets and market share gain within established ones.
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Giga, 11/20/03: The Balanced Scorecard for IT: Value Metrics
Craig Symons
The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) has gained significant traction within our client companies at the corporate level as well as with IT organizations. IT organizations are successfully using the BSC as a measurement and management tool to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their operations and to communicate the value of IT throughout the enterprise. Our research has demonstrated that the key to a successful BSC is almost entirely dependent on the quality of the metrics, i.e., metrics that are jointly developed with end users, metrics that encompass the BSC implementation. When it comes to the IT value perspective within the IT BSC, it is imperative that the selected metrics measure and communicate business value as opposed to IT value.
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SMB
Infoworld, 12/8/03: SMBs gearing up for technology upgrades
Improvements in broadband, wireless, CRM to drive buys
By Tom Krazit
About 40 percent of U.S. small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) are planning to spend more money on technology in 2004 than they did this year, but IT vendors will need to make sure they deliver appropriate technology at the right price, said analysts from The Yankee Group at the Boston company's SMB Forum Monday.
After making do with their current infrastructure and software environment over the last two years, many companies with fewer than 1,000 employees have decided that it is time to upgrade, driven by improvements in broadband services, wireless communications, and customer-relationship management software, said Eileen Eastman, vice president of business communications strategies for Yankee Group.
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Mobile
Computerworld, 12/8/03: Making the VPN connection
Story by Keith Schultz
DECEMBER 08, 2003 ( INFOWORLD ) - When a VPN does its job correctly, remote users don't notice it's there. Packets move from site to site, user to user. Encryption algorithms scramble the data and then safely unscramble it at the other end. Information flows. Work gets done.
But this unseen extension to the enterprise network is in the midst of a major technology shift -- the biggest since the mid-'90s, when VPNs first provided inexpensive Internet alternatives to carriers' proprietary private networks. For years, software solutions based on IPSec have ruled VPNs. But new SSL appliances are changing all that.
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